In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders of the Twentieth Century.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Brief Article - Book Review

In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders of the Twentieth Century. By Anthony J. Mayo and Nitin Nohria. Harvard Business School Press, 444 pages. $35.

As much about social history as personality profiles, In Their Time has an astoundingly ambitious goal: To reduce a century of convulsive change in business to a series of chapters about different decades, their economic drivers and the executives who exemplified leadership in those eras.

In effect, the authors ask if leaders of certain decades--Jack Welch of General Electric Co., Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp., Walt Disney--could have succeeded in other times. While there is probably no absolute answer, they frame much of the book around what they deem "contextual intelligence"--the ability to read the times and exploit the available opportunities. As they note, this ability goes beyond personality, industry smarts and emotional intelligence.

As they work through the various eras, the authors also conclude that the individual leaders could be divided into three...